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James Murdoch Denies Misleading Parliamentary Panel

James Murdoch, the News Corporation executive, left Parliament after being questioned in the phone hacking scandal.Credit
Associated Press

LONDON — Nothing rattled James Murdoch. Not being compared to the Mafia boss of a criminal enterprise run on fear and omertà. Not being accused of being willfully blind, shockingly incurious or curiously casual about his corporation’s money.

During two and a half hours of forensic, skeptical and even rude questioning from a parliamentary panel on Thursday, Mr. Murdoch, the 38-year-old deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, never wavered from his original account: that he had learned only recently that phone hacking had been widespread at the company’s tabloid News of the World, now defunct.

He said he had never misled the committee in earlier testimony in July. And he all but accused two former underlings, whose accounts directly contradicted his, of lying about it.

Much was riding on how Mr. Murdoch handled the lawmakers’ questioning, including his personal credibility and the health of the News Corporation media empire. The hacking scandal has tarnished the company, forced it to summarily shut down a newspaper, scuttled its $12 billion bid to acquire the satellite giant British Sky Broadcasting, destroyed its symbiotic relationship with Britain’s political establishment, and added to the strains between Mr. Murdoch and his father, Rupert, the company’s chairman.

At least 16 former employees have been arrested, including two former editors of The News of the World. (None has yet been charged.) A number of executives, including Les Hinton, publisher of The Wall Street Journal and chief executive of Dow Jones, have resigned.

Throughout his appearance before the panel, the House of Commons’ committee on culture, media and sport, a calm and confident Mr. Murdoch sought to portray hacking as a problem of the past and something that had forced the company to re-evaluate its practices.

“It is a matter of great regret that things went wrong,” he said. Mr. Murdoch said he had first been made aware of an unresolved hacking problem in the spring of 2008, when he was briefly executive chairman of News International, News Corporation’s British newspaper arm. That was when company executives asked for his approval to settle a case with Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, who had accused The News of the World of hacking his phone.

The executives had in their possession several pieces of internal evidence showing that Mr. Taylor was right, and that phone hacking at The News of the World was not limited to one reporter or one incident, as the company would later publicly and repeatedly assert. But Mr. Murdoch said that no one showed any evidence to him, even as he was urged to approve a large payment to Mr. Taylor.

“None of these things were made available to me or discussed with me,” he said. “I was given sufficient information to authorize an increase in the settlement offer. But I was given no more than that.”

His assertion directly contradicted the testimony of two former executives — Colin Myler, then the editor of The News of the World, and Tom Crone, then News International’s chief legal officer. The pair contacted the committee in July, after Mr. Murdoch’s initial testimony, to say that he had not told the truth. They had indeed, they asserted, told him about an incendiary piece of evidence, the “for Neville” e-mail (a reference to Neville Thurlbeck, the chief reporter for The News of the World) that contained transcripts of hacked conversations and proved that hacking had gone beyond a single journalist.

Mr. Murdoch said that although he was told the e-mail existed — a shift from his previous testimony, when he claimed never to have heard of it — no one had shown it to him or explained its significance.

“I believe their testimony was misleading, and I dispute it,” he said of Mr. Myler’s and Mr. Crone’s statements.

“The simple truth is that he was told by us in 2008 about the damning e-mail and what it meant in terms of wider News of the World involvement,” he said.

In his testimony, Mr. Murdoch went out of his way to criticize Mr. Myler, who became editor of The News of the World after the original phone hacking case, in which the newspaper’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, was jailed in 2007. Mr. Myler should have told him what was going on and fixed it, he said.

“This was the job of the new editor who had come in, for lack of a better word, to clean this up — to make me aware of these things,” he said. He said that in a company of 50,000 employees around the world, “We rely on executives at various levels of the business to behave in a certain way.”

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Members of the committee, though, were openly incredulous at Mr. Murdoch’s contention that when lawyers advised him to settle the Taylor case for hundreds of thousands of pounds, he had failed to ask basic questions about their reasoning.

“I find it incredible, absolutely incredible, that you didn’t say, ‘A quarter of a million? Let me look at that,’ ” said Philip Davies, a Conservative Party member of the committee. “I can’t begin to believe that that is the action that any self-respecting chief operating officer would take, when so much of the company’s money and reputation is at stake.”

Paul Farrelly, another committee member, said that “any 10-year-old” would have asked how Mr. Goodman could have been the only journalist guilty of phone hacking when Mr. Goodman’s job was to cover the royal family, and Mr. Taylor was clearly “not a member of the royal family.”

“Did you not say, ‘He’s not royal?’ ” he asked.

Mr. Murdoch replied, “The details of the specific voice-mail interceptions — those things were not at the top of my mind.”

Tom Watson, a Labour member of the committee and a persistent Murdoch critic, brought up recent revelations that The News of the World had hired private investigators as recently as a year ago to conduct secret surveillance on dozens of people, including lawyers representing phone hacking victims, and Mr. Watson himself.

Mr. Murdoch said that he found the disclosures “appalling” and “shocking,” and that he was sorry.

Mr. Watson also asked whether Mr. Murdoch had heard of “omertà,” the Mafia code of silence.

“I’m not an aficionado of such things,” Mr. Murdoch said. Mr. Watson then suggested that News International was run along those lines, and added, “You must be the first Mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise.”

Afterward, the panel’s chairman, John Whittingdale, said that having taken all the oral testimony it needed, the committee would now begin preparing its report on the hacking scandal, particularly in light of the discrepancies between Mr. Murdoch’s testimony and the statements of Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone.

“We’re going to have to spend a long time deliberating before we reach judgments and conclusions,” he told reporters. “Of the two accounts we have heard, one of them is not true.”

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.

A version of this article appears in print on November 11, 2011, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Murdoch Holds Fast In the Face Of a Storm. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe